Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Europe

Travelling a thousand miles and across three billion years, Christopher Somerville (walking correspondent of The Times and author of Coast, The January Man and Ships of Heaven) sets out to interrogate the land beneath our feet, and how it has affected every aspect of human history from farming to house construction, the Industrial Revolution to the current climate crisis. In his thousand-mile journey, Somerville follows the story of Britain's unique geology, travelling from the three-billion-year-old rocks of the Isle of Lewis, to the furthest corner of Essex.

A Northerner in exile, Stuart Maconie goes on a journey in search of the North, attempting to discover where the clichés end and the truth begins. He travels from Wigan Pier to Blackpool Tower and Newcastle's Bigg Market to the Lake District to find his own Northern Soul, encountering along the way an exotic cast of chippy Scousers, pie-eating woollybacks, topless Geordies, mad-for-it Mancs, Yorkshire nationalists and brothers in southern exile.

After coming terrifyingly close to suicide, Jake Tyler was determined to take back control of his life from the clutches of depression. With only a pair of walking boots and a backpack, he left his home town of Maldon and began a 3,000-mile walk around the British mainland. In documenting every step of his adventure, Jake shares the ways in which his road to recovery was enhanced by the kindness of strangers, who helped him to better understand himself and the power of human connection.

This audiobook will take the listener on the slow train to another era when travel meant more than hurrying from one place to the next, the journey meaning nothing but time lost in crowded carriages, condemned by broken timetables. On the Slow Train will reconnect with that long-missed need to lift our heads from the daily grind and reflect that there are still places in Britain where we can stop and stare. It will tap into many things: a love of railways, a love of history, a love of nostalgia.

When Susan quit her job in London and set sail off the south coast of England on her beloved sailboat, Isean, she was unaware this spontaneous departure would lead to a three-year journey spanning several countries across the continent. With only the very basics on board, resourcefulness becomes an unexpected source of joy and contentment. But for all the physical and navigational challenges of her journey, the other side of her story reveals a more important change - an inner journey - that took place along the way.

Michael Williams has spent the past year travelling along the fascinating rail byways of Britain for this new collection of journeys. Here is the 'train to the end of the world' running for more than four splendid hours through lake, loch and moorland from Inverness to Wick, the most northerly town in Britain. He discovers a perfect country branch line in London’s commuterland, and travels on one of the slowest services in the land along the shores of the lovely Dovey estuary to the far west of Wales. Here is a unique travel companion celebrating the treasures of our railway heritage....

From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm. With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia.

A tiny ad in a local newspaper catches Cédric Sapin-Defour’s eye: a litter of Bernese Mountain Dog puppies need homes. A lonely, single, gym teacher and mountain climber in the French Alps, Cédric visits the dogs and immediately falls for a puppy with a blue collar who steps over his siblings to get to him. Named Ubac, French for the north side of the mountain – the rainy, cloudy slope – the puppy quickly upends Cédric’s life. They go on hikes together, taking to the hills and exploring, forging a bond that brings joy and a sense of fulfillment and adventure.

Our countryside is iconic: a series of distinctive habitats that unite to create a landscape that is unique for the rich diversity of our flora and fauna. In England, his most magisterial book to date, John Lewis-Stempel explores each in turn, taking us from coast to moor, from downs to field, from the park to the village to create a vivid living portrait of our natural history.

In an adventure of a lifetime, Alexander Armstrong heads north into an ever more hostile Arctic winter to explore the farthest reaches of the globe. In an epic journey, he navigates some of the Earth's toughest terrain, first travelling through the glittering landscape of Scandinavia then on to the isolated islands of Iceland and Greenland, as far as the infamously treacherous Northwest Passage. His final frontier is Canada and Alaska, where his journey ends on the international dateline between the USA and Russia.

Editor Eleanor Brown presents a collection of personal essays from 18 different authors about their experiences in the City of Light.

Meet Sergeant Colin Taylor, he has been a valuable member of the police force for over 20 years, five of which have been spent policing the 'quiet' Isles of Scilly, a group of islands off the southwestern tip of the Cornish peninsula. Colin has made it his purpose to keep the streets of Scilly free from anchor thieves, goldfish abductors and other culprits, some drunken, intent on breaking the law. This book is the first-hand account of how he did it.

In The Secret History of French Cooking, Luke Barr takes readers inside the culinary rebellion that upended the staid French food world and reinvented the role and cultural importance of chefs and restaurants. The very idea of the chef as creator—as innovator, artist, auteur—can be traced back to the legendary Paul Bocuse, Michel Guérard, and the Troisgros brothers, among other colorful characters. The book also tells the largely unknown story of a group of women chefs who fought for recognition in the all-male culinary establishment of the 1970s.

Growing up on the Cambridgeshire Fens, Will Millard never felt more at home than when he was out with his granddad on the riverbank whiling away the day catching fish. As he grew older his competitive urge to catch more and bigger fish led him away from that natural connection between him, his grandfather and the rivers of his home and into large commercial fisheries catching fish after fish.

Inspired by breathtaking views and romantically dreaming of finding love in the mountains, Tony Hawks impulsively buys a house in the French Pyrenees. Here, he imagines, he will finally fulfil his childhood fantasy of mastering the piano, untroubled by the problems of the world.

‘I am fascinated by people turning their daft dreams into a reality. How did they do it and why?’ Driven by his own passion for collecting Hunter Davies has packed his notepad and set off in search of Britain’s maddest museums. As he explores these hidden gems he soon discovers that they are everywhere and that they celebrate just about everything, from lawnmowers in Southport to pencils in Keswick.

I’m going to define the essence of this sprawling place as best I can. I’m going to start here, in this village, and radiate out like a ripple in a pond. I don’t want to go to the obvious places, either; I want to be like a bus driver on my first morning on the job, getting gloriously lost, turning up where I shouldn’t. I’m going to confirm or deny the clichés, holding them up to see where the light gets in.